Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good afternoon, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is 02/11/2026, at 01:04AM m. We're here with a former member, Emily Jessup. She's here to talk to us about the independent colleges in the state of Vermont. So, Kimberly, good to see you again. Glad to have you on that end of the table.

[Kimberly (Kim) Jessup, Executive Director, Association of Vermont Independent Colleges (AVIC)]: Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. As the Chair said, my name is Kimberly Jessup, and I'm with the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges or AVIC. AVIC is a member organization comprised of the 11 private nonprofit colleges in Vermont. We've been around since 'eighty two. And basically, we exist to forward the interests of the sector. We work with the publics as well. We are very proud of our contributions to Vermont. And I took the liberty of putting out some paper, and I know that you also on your document page a couple things that I will share just in terms of an overview, and then I'll turn it over to my campus based colleagues who will provide, I think, probably more interesting testimony. So basically the first one, more for Vermont, as you can see, we enroll about 13,400 students. So that's over 2,000 Vermonters. What that also means is we're bringing into the state 11,300 young adults. And that also means that we support our students with about $300,000,000 in institutional aid. So that's aid that people in this room raise with donors, with alumni, and other sources to support students. We employ over 6,200 individuals, and I would add that those are clean, green jobs, typically with benefits. Those are great jobs. They're sprinkled throughout the state. They are in small places. They are in large places. And the number that that translates to in terms of wages is about $317,000,000 And that, by the way, does not include benefits. So that's strictly salaries and wages. Then the final number on that page, more for Vermont, is $728,000,000 and that is without any multipliers. So those are precise expenditures. What I would just add, following up on a conversation I had with a member before we went live, is we are 11 members. One of our members is closing at the August, and that is Sterling College. They are our smallest, well, nearly our smallest. The Center for Cartoon Studies is also small. That closure has been very orderly. I'm happy to report. Frankly, And as privates, you have to make the numbers work, and it can be heartbreaking. We do our very best. There is another member that sometimes people ask me, Are they still open? That is the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the answer is yes, they are still open. They have now partnered with a school in California, Cal Arts, where they started their administrative backroom efficiencies, And they were always, as you probably know for those who have followed that field, they're hybrid, their faculty are all over The United States and even abroad. I have an office actually out of one of the buildings that they previously owned that has since been sold to another entity that may end up entering the private nonprofit sphere that is still pending. So that's just a clarification on that number of 11. The second document, which is probably more appropriate to your work and your focus on workforce, is that it's an overview of what the 11 colleges are doing in terms of workforce. And we are really proud of the work that we're doing. And I could have made that pages and pages long. Two people here in the room will follow me and tell you more about their institutions. But I would just flag there's some really interesting work going on. For example, St. Michael's College, they're doing a lot with medicine. They're doing it as a minor degree. They're doing it as a major degree. The major comes online this coming fall. And they've been operating a fire and rescue squad for nearly fifteen years. Bennington College, they are training mental health counselors. Vermont Law and Graduate School, their lawyers are everywhere. They are in the executive branch, they're in the judicial branch, and they're in this building. And so that's just a long way of saying, I hope that you will spend some time with the document because I think it's impressive and I'm happy to run down or follow-up any questions that may come to that. Before I turn it over to my colleagues, I just want to touch upon three other pieces. One is that you might recall we had the Green Mountain Job and Retention Program that I think was initially funded by federal stimulus dollars. That from the period of 2023 to 2025, about 164 students. Your document will say 154. I just had an updated number yesterday. It's now at 164 from the privates. So these are students who took advantage of a $5,000 loan incentive. So in other words, that would help pay down their student loan with the understanding that they would have to serve working full time in Vermont for two years. I think And

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: living in Vermont.

[Kimberly (Kim) Jessup, Executive Director, Association of Vermont Independent Colleges (AVIC)]: And living in Vermont. And UVM's Office of Community Engagement, I think did a really great job staying that up. They've been just a pleasure to work with. The other thing I would flag is sometimes people don't know this. There are in 2025, this is according to the Open Doors Institute, our private colleges have brought 600 international students to Vermont. So these are families who are sending their children here who are spending their college savings in our small state. That is not insignificant, and it's really helping our communities everywhere. And the number one sending country is Canada. And then the final thing that I would flag for you with philanthropic support, we have been working with CCV on something called the Vermont Transfer Guarantee. And what that is, is if you go to CCV, you finish your associate's degree, and depending on the institution you want to go to, if you have a GPA that's between two point zero or three point zero, you are guaranteed admission to St. Michael's, Norwich or Champlain. And you can ask others here who know more about that. But that program has just been up and coming. We did a soft launch in the '24. We're currently at 30 students. We'd like to work with CCV to grow that more because this is a novel approach. Frankly, the tunnel has been more traditionally toward the public. I think that as you'll hear more, the privates can also offer a lot to those students, particularly with our facilities, our geographic placement, etc. So I will wrap up there, and I would like, if I could, with the Chair's permission, turn it over to President Hernandez of Champlain College.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: On the rebound retention program, how did the students get the word that that was available?

[Kimberly (Kim) Jessup, Executive Director, Association of Vermont Independent Colleges (AVIC)]: That is a very good question. They were sent lots of emails, social media. In fact, that is something I worked with the UVM Office of Community Engagement on. They did a little social media kit. They did media kits and I forwarded it out to all of our student affairs folks that are members so that they would have it. But my 2¢ for what it's worth is that when you start something new, it takes a while to catch on. For example, the Vermont transfer guarantee, we came on along with Maine and New Hampshire. Previous to that, it was launched in Southern Vermont. I mean, Southern New England, and it took them, you know, three, four years to start to get their numbers up.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Some students and the independents have internships, I imagine as well.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Oh, yeah.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. So there may be an opportunity there for for the businesses that provide these internships. If they know that this is available, that they can use that also as a recruitment tool so they can recruit those interns if they wanna recruit them. Can they can use that as well. Just an idea of getting that word further spreading that word out.

[Kimberly (Kim) Jessup, Executive Director, Association of Vermont Independent Colleges (AVIC)]: That's a good idea. We if it does work with the chamber of commerce and I will follow-up on that.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Any questions? Any other questions for thanks, Kimberly.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Thank you.

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Members of the committee. My name is Alex Hernandez. I'm the president of Champlain College, I'm delighted to be here with you today. My father was born in a farm labor camp and my first job was on Wall Street. What made that possible was education and workforce development program. This is something that's really guided and impacted my entire career of trying to figure out how do you create opportunity through these things. When I first met, got to know Champlain College, the, former CEO of IDX, Healthcare Systems said, I had 900 employees, 300 were Champlain grads. They're my best employees. And I just kept having conversations with business leaders over and over again saying something similar. And I know it's not just Champlain, but it's Norwich and Saint Mike's. We're we've got this extraordinary relationship with the business community that allows, you know, our state to kind of punch above its weight for economic growth that allows communities to put food on the table to afford public services. So our mission, at Champlain College is to get students ready for work and be an economic engine for Vermont. And so when I didn't come up with this word ready, this was kind of come up by our business leaders. And it's kind of an extraordinary way to describe a 21 year old. I have 19, year old twin boys, and I aspire for them to be ready historically when they walk the stage. But, it's it's it's really amazing. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how we approach that. So first, few stats. Champlain College has about 2,500 full time students on campus and online. Our college and alumni contribute over $500,000,000 a year in economic impact. So we do an economic impact study every year. Our alumni run about 1,200 businesses across the state right now, and we're a net importer of talent. So about 20% of our entering classes are from Vermont and 40% of our graduating classes stay in Vermont. And we'd like to move that up to over 50%. So we're building workforce pathways in Vermont's leading industries. And I just want to describe to you what that looks like. So we were one of the first colleges in the country to offer undergraduate cybersecurity degrees, and it was because of Senator Patrick Leahy's foresight. He got a national security briefing every day and was far more clued into the risk of cybersecurity back then than any of us and encouraged us. So we launched major and we have an upside down curriculum, which means students start their major their very first semester in college. They don't wait till their junior year like most colleges. And so students begin acquiring these skills. The second thing that they do is we have this Leahy Center for Cybersecurity. And I would say, I weren't the president of Champlain College. I would still say this. It's one of the coolest workforce programs in the country, I believe. So at any given time, we employ or engage 100 students in real cybersecurity work. So they do work with folks like the Howard Center, the Department of Defense, both local and national, Hula, And they start that their very first semester. Again, they don't wait. And so I've got a student in one of my classes right now, and she's been in the Leahy Center for Cybersecurity for three years, getting real experience. And now she runs a team and manages all business development for this student run effort. The Lahey Center basically provides on campus internships such that they've got incredible experience headed to off campus internships. And it's easy to talk about workforce development, how it'll work, at every point you lose students if you don't carefully bridge. So by getting students into their major early on, by getting them real experience as soon as they hit the campus, That then allows them to get real experience with internships. We just introduced co ops, which means students can actually work full time for a company, earn pay, and get academic credit. Most folks who do co ops, they make you go part time, and so it delays your time to graduation. We're trying to do an innovation where it doesn't delay your time to graduation, such that when students enter, they're going all the way through into a career. 96% of our cybersecurity grads are employed in the field. Those 4% simply decided that they don't want to do cybersecurity and they have other options, truth be told, a lot of them would be employed after their second year if that was

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: the path for them.

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: So in a time when people are really questioning the value of higher education, believe experience matters. And so we're telling our families and our students that experience is included in a Champlain College education. I've kind of described to you at all the different points, how we're including experience so that when they graduate, they're able to enter the workforce. You should be very skeptical. I've been a lifelong educator whenever you hear about magic solutions in education. There are no silver bullets in education. We just really intentionally designed a program so that you're thinking about career for four years, not just a year or a year and a half. And most students actually don't really think about their first internship till summer after their junior year. And then at that point, sometimes they get a good internship, sometimes they don't, but it really, really compresses the preparation for students who need to enter the workforce. So what's the impact of a workforce pipeline like this? So three years ago, I went to visit New Harbor Security in Colchester. They're a nationally important cybersecurity firm today. At the time, they're a lot bigger now. They had 130 employees. Half of them are Champlain grads. So again, the education sector and the business sector, that partnership, it's more than just lip service. It's really, really important to fueling commerce and economic growth in our communities. We formalized our partnership. It wasn't informal, it just happened because we had this pipeline with New Harbor and they ended up opening an office on our campus right next to our Leahy Center. So now if you come down to Lakeside, which is right down the street from Houla in South Burlington, you'll see 10,000 square feet of space for students to interact with employers, to interact with hands on training. So we parlay that partnership and in January 2025, we created a high school dual enrollment program and we call it Vermont Cyber Start. And we designed it so high school students can take up to four classes in cybersecurity before they start college. They could earn up to 12 college credits. They'd be the first 12 credits of a major at Champlain, or we designed them to be transferable to other places. They're learning the skills for an entry level security operations center job during that time, and they have an opportunity to earn an undergraduate security in cybersecurity. I'm sorry, undergraduate certificate in cybersecurity. So we're trying to pack a lot of value in for this on ramp for high school students. We had about 38 students in that first cohort, and what we were really excited about was 70% of that cohort was from outside of Chittenden County, and they're from all corners of the state. And so it just goes to show if we worked with the CTE programs to really met with all the CTE leaders and try to spread the word. Just goes to show like when you open up access and open up opportunities that you know people are hungry for opportunity. We're working with partners to reach more students beginning this fall, and so we're going just to keep continuing to see what we can do to grow that program. This model doesn't just work for cybersecurity. So whether it's the Lahey Center, this kind of hands on learning, whether it's Vermont Cyber Start, we think it works in other sectors. And so we want to build workforce pipelines to Vermont's leading industries and ultimately prepare a thousand students per year for Vermont's workforce. There's a lot of conversation about how is higher education responsive to industry. It's a very legitimate question. When I was at my last university, it would take me sometimes up to two years to launch a new degree and four years after that for someone to finish it. And so just that's not really the definition of responsiveness. In the past year, our faculty has redesigned our entire curriculum to be much more responsive to industry. So we've reorganized our curriculum into Lego blocks. And if an employer has a need that we see there's opportunity for, we can stand up a new Lego block, which is three courses in a matter of weeks, and integrate that into different majors, not just one major. So we're working to become much more responsive to industry. I also want to just speak briefly about the impact of AI, because I believe as a college president that AI is going to impact that entry level workforce initially, potentially more than other parts of the sector. And we're thinking about this in two ways. First graduates who leverage AI, they're going to work across more functions. And what I mean by that is when I was growing up, I was told like you really need to just get expertise and go down deep. What these tools are allowing you to do is it's allowing students to go deep in a number of fields so that then they can go abroad. And so I actually think, you know, we're going to bring back the renaissance person of people can do a lot of different things. And we're already seeing this and how companies and teams are getting built. You're seeing fewer people creating much larger businesses and organizations because they're playing across more functions. And we're seeing that both in startups, we're seeing that in larger organizations. The second is the more AI can do, we actually need more humans to manage AI and to be in relationship with each other. And so while there's a lot of concern and trepidation about AI shrinking career opportunities, I think, you know, as we've seen prior technological shifts, typically it creates more jobs. It's just the jobs are different. And so we all remember when ATMs came in and replaced bank tellers, The bank teller job changed. It became more skilled. It became more technical. It became more customer service oriented. And so we expect to see that occur here too. But what that means is professional skills matter more than ever. And so I was at a very fast growing advanced manufacturing company in aviation that you guys all know well. And I said, What do you need from your software engineers? And one of the leaders said, People skills. And I said, what do you mean? And I said, well, as AI does more and more of the technical work, we need people who can go and work across business functions and talk to other people about their needs and their requirements. And so it was just interesting to see this growth. And for a lot of time in higher education, we didn't consider those skills before in the academic program. And so now we're thinking about how do we use studio environments? How do we use collaborative projects to really make those professional skills, those human skills part of the normal college, those regular college curriculum. And that's a big effort at Champlain College. I think it's really, really important for our students. And I think we all know that, you know, in ourselves that, you know, the folks we experienced who have been really successful at really strong human skills, that's going to continue to be more important. I think there's a very real risk that AI creates a new divide between people who can use it effectively and those who cannot. And so how do we continue to educate and how do we continue to support these workforce pipelines in ways that are really powerful? I think it's very important. So in closing, you guys have seen a lot of this data, but we have about 17,000 people leaving the workforce every year, and we have about 5,000 high school seniors in the state. And we might think that, well, people will just come move in and occupy that gap, but it's less than 1,000 people a year just moving in to kinda take jobs. And we believe that higher education is one of the biggest levers available to our state to bring people to help do the things that we need to do to run our organizations, to build community, to create tax revenue. And so that's why I'm so passionate about this higher education relationship with Vermont and with business. I would love to work with you to support not just a higher education strategy, but an overall strategy to attract people to the state of Vermont, which involves higher education, but in some cases doesn't. I just think the more we can collectively think about that, that's gonna be really important given our demographic trends. While there's big challenges in the world, we all read the papers. You guys, have incredible responsibility to manage these challenges. This is an exciting time as I've seen in my career around workforce development, and, and I'm just really optimistic that we can do some really special things so our communities can thrive. So thank you.

[Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: Two questions, sort of unrelated. So the first one, academic, I don't specific, I guess, to Champlain College. Yeah. You're just talking about industries in AI, and one of the new industries that is emerging is prompt engineers. Yes. Is that a program? Where are you are you gonna be? I I presume you're gonna have a program like that, but where are you going to be? Where are you at with that?

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: Yeah. We're designing two AI majors right now. So those are artificial until they're approved by our faculty senate. So just for the record, I'm not announcing the launch of two majors quite yet, but we're designing, we expect to have that design done by the end of the spring. One is for computer science students who are interested in artificial intelligence, will be more technical than other. We're looking at how do we make something more general to students who are in other majors or other field of interest. Engineering got a lot of attention early on. You know, we're paying a lot of attention to this idea that AI is not just these open AI chatbots that we probably most experience, but there's these agents that people are creating that these kind of autonomous things that basically resemble workers. And so how do you create them? How do you design them? How do you coordinate them? And so we're thinking both across, what does it mean to work with these LLMs that we know, but really these agents that are gonna be a big part of what the business sector is looking at.

[Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: And then my second question is more on the economic aspect. What do you think is the biggest problem with getting people to come to the state to come to our colleges? What do you see as the biggest obstacle?

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: I think first, I think we need to think broadly as a state about how So each one of us as colleges think about how we attract our students. But I actually think there's an opportunity to look at how the state attracts students. The residential college population has been declining over the last decade in a way that's disproportionate to the rest of New England, which has its own demographic pressures. And so I think there's an opportunity there. I think the second challenge is, we sometimes have students who are trying to make a choice between staying in Vermont or going to Boston. And you would intuitively think that going to Boston is more expensive than living in Vermont, in some cases it's not. And so students are trying to figure out this, how do they kind of secure their futures early on? I think what's really positive is I feel like we punch way above our weight from a business standpoint for the size of our state. But I don't think students necessarily recognize that until we really, really explain it to them. I teach entrepreneurship once a year and as I'm teaching right now this spring and I teach five of my classes at Hula and I bring in speakers every year. Towards the end my class last year, a student said to me, she's like, Wow, Vermont's a really great place to work. And so because she experienced it and she had that exposure, she kind of got there mentally, but she didn't start there mentally. And so I think there's things we can do both as individual institutions, but as a collective to really put that case forward.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Thank you so much for all of that wonderful information. Of course. One thing that stuck out to me is that you have a pretty high proportion of students starting businesses. Yeah. And you obviously teach an entrepreneurship aspect. What kind of support do you offer students for, like, small business support post grad?

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: Yeah. It's a great question. We don't have any postgraduate kind of funding or one of the things that I'm toying around with. And again, this is a projected idea, this is not an announcement, but this idea of like, what does it mean to have like bring your ideas to life fund where students can, regardless of whether they're entrepreneurs or we have a big filmmaker populate, we just have people from a lot of different sectors who have ideas to support that. We don't have that yet, but I think that's something that we'd like to.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: And then is there any conversation about ongoing mentorship or that sort of thing?

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: Yeah, so afterwards, so students have lifelong access to our Champlain Exchange, which is where our career center sits, where our entrepreneurial support sits. And so we try to kind of create that network and we, especially in Vermont, we see people all the time and we try to connect them into networks and keep them engaged. We don't yet have formal programs like you're describing, but as we grow the Champlain Exchange, we grow it for co op programs. We're trying

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: to do more around that. Thank you. Questions? Good

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: question. Thanks. Abbey Duke from Burlington. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. I'm curious how your enrollment trends are looking. Know, obviously, we're at a very challenging time demographics. I know Champlain has been really creative and innovative.

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: I mean, I'll be candid, the last couple of years from an enrollment standpoint have been tough. And some of those are related to the world, some of those relate to Vermont, some of those are related to Champlain. So as an example, in the world when a couple of years ago when they changed the FAFSA form, no one could apply to financial aid till like April when normally it starts in November. And it was a massive disruption to the college application process. That was right after you went from like COVID to this FAFSA thing to this year, there was the disruption around research funding and international students. And I didn't think that was gonna impact us because we don't have a lot of research funding or national students. But essentially what happened was colleges and universities that had a lot of those dollars had a lot of revenue to replace, and so they over enrolled domestic students to try to replace those revenues. And so you actually saw a big shift in how students were attending college. So those are just a couple of things I could go on and on, but from a higher education sector nationally, this is as a chaotic a time as I've seen. From a Vermont standpoint, as I've described, I think Vermont's felt as a sector disproportionately enrollment pressures, sorry, enrollment pressures disproportionate to the Northeast. And for us, I mean, we're continuing to working really hard to define our brand and who we are and make sure that students see value proposition. But there's a lot of competition both regionally and nationally for students as overall. I mean, if you do a web search, you'll see across the country, I mean, a lot of people are trying to figure out, navigate enrollment pressures right now. Yeah.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good questions.

[Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College]: Thank you very much. I'm going to pass it off to Robos Winds.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. It's nice to meet you. I'm Leah Williams. I'm the provost and dean of the faculty at Norwich University. I think you're aware it's located down the road in Northfield, Vermont. Founded in 1819. We're the oldest private military college in the nation, the birthplace of ROTC. Right now, we have about 3,000 students across residential and online programs. And, of course, we, educate a big chunk of our on campus students in the Corps of Cadets, and we have a traditional civilian student population as well.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We have one of your students and one of our interns.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Oh, excellent.

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: One of the cadets.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: I always like to hear that. And usually it's good feedback back. I hope so. Excellent. I'll just mention that I have lived in Northfield for the twenty years I've been at the institution, chose to, live where we were working, educate my kids locally, you know, I'm really committed to trying to help Central Vermont thrive and to the entire state. Vermont has done a lot for me, and I hope to get back to it. And I think our university has a really key place in the Central Vermont area, and we wanna be like champagne up the road, this corridor hopefully of dynamic opportunities for our young people. So I would just echo some of what you've already heard that private higher education is, sure, we're granting degrees of course, but we are contributing to Vermont's workforce pipeline in some pretty substantial ways. I will hit or focus on several key areas, including nursing, cybersecurity, engineering, criminal justice. I'll start with talking a little bit about our contributions, specifically in terms of students who are Vermonters. 89 of our 194 students in nursing programs, are Vermont, residents, and about 70% of our graduates get licensed to practice in Vermont. So that's good evidence that they are connected to the state and staying to work and are much needed. We have a much smaller handful of students. About 25 of our two forty five criminal justice students are Vermonters. And I'll talk more about that figure in a minute. 21 engineering, about 19 cybersecurity, 17 architecture students. These are all critical areas where, we have students who are, again, contributing to the work workforce post graduation. Because of our identity as a military college, I'm sure you're aware that that differentiates us in some interesting ways, including that the goal of many of our students is to commission in the military, and that entails, of course, leaving the state. So we have a high number of students who are going to commission in the Army, for example, who study criminal justice because they're seeing that as well, a potential pathway in their Army career, but also post military. And some of them do come back to Vermont. I will say, again, this won't be news to you, that the state can be challenging to attract that population back because we don't offer some of the benefits that other states do. For example, we tax their military retirement and we don't have the basis that other states do that offer amenities that we can't support. So that changes our makeup a little bit, but we do have a lot of students who don't commission and are looking for that next exciting opportunity, we're trying to make it clear that Vermont could be that location for them. In addition, we have robust online programs in nursing, cybersecurity, criminal justice, many other things, but that's where I was just going to focus briefly. Right now, we have 71 students in our online nursing programs who are Vermonters. 59 of them are in grad programs, so upskilling while they're currently working, and 12 are in the RN to BSN program. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. We have about 30 cybersecurity programs, 30 grad, eight undergrad, and about 16 grads in our criminal justice programs. So all told, we have about two fifty students in workforce critical programs. Of course, there are students in other programs I'm focusing on at this moment who are also relevant to the conversation. The 59 graduate students, for example, in nursing are pursuing the MSN or nurse practitioner credentials. Many of them, of course, are working nurses, so they're staying on the job, they're staying in Vermont, and they're seeking to advance their education and career opportunities with the understanding, I think many of them do end up staying in the state. We also have robust internship opportunities. We have a center for career readiness. Over a 100 students completed internships in Vermont during 2025. Those could be for credit or not for credit. They could be through an academic program or something that they found independently. We do our best to track all of those combinations. About 60 to 70% of employees who come to our campus to recruit are Vermont based, or they at least have offices in the state. And our center, the CCR, is working hard to build those established pipelines to Vermont employers across various industries, but again, focusing primarily on healthcare, law enforcement, and cyber. Nursing is an interesting workforce, partnership, an example of such. It's one of our fastest growing programs at the university and investment in nursing spans partnerships, infrastructure, and federal funding. We have the partnership with the UVM Health Network, which has, and Vermont State University, we partnered on an accelerated BSN pathway supported by a million and a half in federal dollars and state grant funding. So that allows healthcare employees can continue working. They're making wages while they are studying. We have committed or completed rather, phase one of a new school of nursing, teaching, simulation center. It's down on the square in Northfield. It's funded through congressionally directed spending from Senator Sanders in FY23. Phase two is a $557,000 request. We just got news, I think in the past week that this was supported. So we're very excited about this. This will add a maternal and birthing simulator, new simulation clinic rooms, a community health simulation room, and will allow us to update some of our clinical and didactic spaces down in that old armory on the square. Most recently, we have developed a doctorate of nursing practice program. We submitted a substantive change proposal to NETCHY. This is our first doctoral level program. It seemed very on mission and brand for us to start with nursing. They approved it without qualification, which is wonderful. We are waiting until FY27. We have new leadership in the College of Graduate and Continuing Studies and have given him not an order, that's to use Norwich language, but he is partnering to scrub that college from top to bottom to make sure we really are offering the most relevant up to date programs we can. So our original intent was to launch in '26, but the plan right now is '27. I will add that that could change. It just depends on what we find as we continue this study. But that would allow us to create from the RN to BSN, all the way up to the DNP, pipeline for practitioners, but also for nurse educators. I'm sure many of you are aware that this is a really challenging space. Having these programs means you have to staff them with a qualified faculty, and that is really tough. So we're hoping to expand that pipeline and have more educators out there. So I will also add, we have clinical affiliations with UVM in seven other locations in the state. So we're already sending our students out into communities around Vermont where they are forming those relationships and partnerships. Often those clinical placements can result in job opportunities for those students. I'll switch briefly to talk a little bit about cybersecurity. We are a National Security Agency designated National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity. We're home to the Lahey School security and Advanced Computing. So he has left a wonderful legacy in the state, in this domain. We broke ground in 2025. I don't know when the last time you've maybe passed through Northfield, but you will see a beautiful new building going up. It will open in the 2026. This is called the Cyber Fusion Research and Development Center. This was also funded through congressionally directed spending. This is intended to be an interdisciplinary hub for student research and industry collaboration. My associate provost for research is leading the charge on bringing together all of the partners. So she's in conversation with Noari, which is the Norwich University Applied Research Institute, as the new president after many years of being led by Phil Seussman. I just met with him recently. He is very energized about trying to bring business opportunities, especially to young entrepreneurs. They have an idea and a unit like Nwari can maybe provide some seed funding to develop those ideas to try to show you can stay in Vermont and thrive as an entrepreneur. So we're very aligned in that vision. And of course, connecting with academics, offering students research opportunities, internship opportunities. So we're excited to see where that will take us and more to come since we're just launching in the fall. We have a cyber leader development program that has expanded from 24 to 50 members. This provides our students with research opportunities, a lot of connections with federal agencies, workforce certifications, technical training. And we're hoping that we can just continue to help support these opportunities to make Central Vermont a relevant place for cyber security and development. Few other small things I'll touch on, just as a matter of interest, Norwich has received multiple National Science Foundation Awards to advance STEM workforce development through scholarships and curriculum enhancement. Since 2022, we've had 21 students receive these scholarships and a new $2,000,000 NSF Engineering STEM award was launched in 2025. Really proud of these efforts. That is our faculty going out there, doing the hard work of pursuing this funding. We've been very fortunate so far, knocking on wood. We have not felt the profound disruption in regard to research funding that some institutions have. I think just we're fortunate due to the type in kind that that has stayed pretty intact and stable thus far. But as you said, these are chaotic, times in higher education. So every day almost brings a new surprise. So I think I will just share few other points here. I think this is relevant to thinking about workforce development. We have a series of cybersecurity certificates offered in our online programs. These can include computer forensic investigation, incident response team management, cyber law, all sorts of related things. And those stack into the full MS in cybersecurity. So we are seeing those as a way to offer students opportunities to, again, upskill. Maybe they need to lean in and focus on a certain area for their career development. And we already have those in place. We've been doing this kind of development for, excuse me, several years. So I think I would just end by saying and reiterating what my colleagues said previously, that higher ed is a proven, measurable contributor to Vermont's workforce, that we have a significant part to play in that, especially with nursing, cybersecurity, law enforcement, engineering, architecture, and that we would like to partner in any way that we can to help Vermont become an even more vibrant place. I have a 19 year old and a 22 year old. They went out of state for college. They got to do what they feel is right for them, but it is a problem we know with the loss of young people leaving the state, and we wanna provide opportunities to attract them back at the right time. Thank you. I'm happy to answer questions.

[Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: Glad I ask you the same thing. Asked him, what do you think is the biggest obstacle preventing kids from coming to your college?

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Cost. It's really challenging, the cost of higher education. The cost of maintaining a residential campus adds to that. It's wonderful to be 200 years old, but there are challenges that come along with that. So I think that's part of it. I also think attracting young people to a rural state like ours I taught at the university until the last several years as full time faculty. Many conversations with students like, aren't you if they were dissatisfied. And they tell me sometimes, they're from urban areas and they're just looking for that culture. This is a complete aside, but it could connect. We are standing up an outdoor school at the university that I'm really excited about. This is a passion project. I could tell you all about how it connects to the Alden Partridge foundational philosophy that started the university or the activities of cadets a hundred years ago when they built a 25 mile trail system around the town in Northfield. And they did it because they knew that it would benefit the community and it would bring tourist dollars to the state. So I'm trying to we're reviving this sentiment. It was all the cadets because they study engineering and construction and they did the building. They built lodges at the base of Scragg Mountain, Bald Mountain, and on top of Payne Mountain. So I think it's really important for us to find that right fit. Students are going to be energized by that kind of natural environment. So we're trying to develop substantial outdoor learning that takes advantage of the natural environment and ultimately could benefit the town and the whole region. So long winded answer, but I think those are the gist of the challenges for us.

[Emily Carris Duncan (Member)]: Hi, Emily Carris, Wilmington, Windham, Halifax. Nice to meet you too. Along the lines of what Tony was asking, what are the challenges in staffing recruitment and retention?

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. Housing is the number one problem. It is challenging to find a place and to be able to afford it as a new professional, right? Entering, say, we're recruiting young faculty. How are they going to find that house? And then how are they going to pay for it on their salary, especially if they're coming from graduate school, not to pay back student loans. So we have been turned down not just for faculty positions, but also staff positions because of housing multiple times. People said, I tried to find a place to stay and I couldn't, and I have to turn this job down, which is pretty devastating. There are some interesting things happening in Northfield to develop some more housing. There's going be a building going up next to the Dollar General. A lot of that is Norwich alumni who are investing in the community. So I'm hopeful that we can help provide a little bit of a pressure release on this, but it is a huge challenge. Then sometimes the conversation around, local schools. Yeah. Those are the big ones.

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: Just wanted to correct one thing that you said earlier about the retirement for

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: As I said it, this has changed recently. Is that correct? Okay. And that's really important for us to advertise to people who might be thinking of, obviously, a lot of military connected people. Adjacent people are very attracted to the university. So thank you for that. Appreciate it. Make sure I have the right

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: language. And to share with everyone who just presented, the Green Mountain Jobs Program originated Job retention. Originated in this committee. And so to hear that it's working to keep graduates in the state is amazing. And we've heard from some businesses that they're willing to match at least a portion of it. We're to folks out there. Nurse educators is something that we've been following for years and trying to come up with as many ways as possible to incentivize nurses to teach other nurses because we need more nurses. So we love hearing that you're doing that as well. If there are things that we should be doing to encourage that, that's a key workforce development area.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We work closely with our healthcare committee in creating loan forgiveness programs for nurses. So if they stay in the state, group is active.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Yeah. I think we have more than a handful, I would say, maybe over a dozen or a dozen and a half students who are taking advantage of that program right now.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. I know a few years ago in the capital bill, we put some money in there for simulation labs. I think Norwich got some of that funding.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Yeah. This was a federal state funded effort. We

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: really tuned into the nursing shortage and try to provide more dollars so that we could get more nurses in.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Appreciate it. Yeah, I think we are making progress. It's just that it's a steep hill. Yeah.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I don't know if you know it, but one of your graduates is a member in Ways and Means, Representative Page, is a graduate of Norwich. I know that. Went into the service and retired from the service and moved back to Newport. He's serving here.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: I love those stories. Absolutely. Are your young friends? Yeah, to be frank, I will echo my colleague. Probably every small college across the country will tell you the same thing. Our enrollment has declined since the pandemic by about 20%. I mean, these are IPEDS numbers, so you can find them. There is some hope. We have a really strong enrollment management team that has done a deep dive into how do we focus on, again, matching the kind of student, because it's not for everybody and that's okay. Mean, Norwich University, especially the Corps of Cadets, is not gonna be everybody's dream. But for those who really have that desire to be in a structured environment, the discipline that is provided, the character and leadership development that are crucial to what we do in the core, they are much more likely to stay. So we had a very good class in the fall, so we think we can offset this declining enrollment, and we're on target to exceed our fall number. So, we think we're we're on the upward swing. But it it is that is the toughest job, I think, at the university, those who are doing recruiting and enrollment. Yeah.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I understand you have some students who are fighting.

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: We do. They are exchange students, generally, who come for a brief period. But, yeah, we have a long partnership with Taiwan. We, in fact, we had one of their generals on campus from their military institute in the fall, and it's a really great long term partnership.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Director general from the office in Boston is here talking with us yesterday. Oh, okay. Great. He comes every year, get a chance to have that conversation with them as well. Great. Anything else?

[Leah Williams, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Norwich University]: Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. Nice meeting you.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: How are you?

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: I'm back.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good to see you. Have a seat.

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: Rowan should be joining momentarily to help drive slab deck. She's down in house ads for different testimony for us.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We could take a short break, and then when Jerome's ready, we can come back. Saying

[Abbey Duke (Member)]: to him over. I just was texting about their testimony and how's that?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Five minutes committee, Thank you. We'll come right back. Bye after two.